Blood and Frost
by BazMahtaz
Summary: After the events of DA2 Hawke, Anders, and Fenris leave Kirkwall and head South, out of Thedas. Stumbling across another civilization they find themselves on a new quest that is much more than they bargained for. Hawke X Anders Fenris x OC. M for Safety!
1. The White Waste

Hellooo everyone.

So this is my first crack at posting any fanfiction for public scrutiny, and please DO scrutinize. As long as it's constructive I welcome and appreciate all criticism.

I may have fiddled with the canon a wee bit in writing this (you'll notice a certain someone who is supposed to have been killed in DA2 isn't.) and of course I am adding to the history of the Dragon Age universe in order to make things make sense. But I have made an attempt and keeping things somewhat accurate.

So without further delay here's my first attempt at entertaining you!

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><p>The wind outside their tent picked up, whistling maddly as the scraping of snow and ice across the snapping fabric took on an eerie note that made the bearded warrior flinch. He found himself leaning a bit closer to Anders who put an arm around his shoulders.<p>

He should have expected it to be this cold just from the name of the place, to say nothing of the way the old man on the outskirts of the White Waste looked at him when Hawke announced his intention to cross it. It had been near to a month since that had happened and now he, and his two remaining companions were huddled under what they could barely call a tent and trying to warm themselves around a small ball of floating Magefire. Cold, hungry, and entirely regretting this foolhardy attempt at escaping the wrath of the Chantry that had landed them in much worse danger, and cursing at the sorry excuse for a map that Hawke was trying to read with frozen fingers was not helping at all.

"If we turn back we're just as likely to die as if we keep moving. There has to be some scrap of civilization out here somewhere!" Anders sounded more like he was trying to convince himself than the other two men as he mumbled from under his scraggly beard. His hand left Hawkes shoulder to begin rubbing together against the other in an attempt to salvage some sense of heat.

Fenris made a noise in the back of his throat that reminded Hawke of the former-slave's namesake. Why he had chosen to come along, knowing that Anders would be with him, was beyond Hawke's ability to comprehend. Not that he was about to press the elven warrior about it now.

"If I knew where we were now, I could make a guess at how much farther we have to go." Hawke huffed and folded the map away into his satchel in favour of a hunk of dried jerky that tasted like nothing and did little to quell is aching stomach.

In a few days, they would be out of food, and then what?

The wind died for the first time since he had awoken and Hawke jerked his head towoard the flap of the tent. "Lets keep moving. We'll set down if the storm picks up again."

It took under a minute to pack everything up and start walking in the direction they had marked as south. Trudging through the snow that had risen up to their knees overnight. Even Fenris had forsaken attempting to move barefoot, and was wearing thick leather and fur boots to guard against the frost's hard bite.

Luckily enough, the storm seemed to have passed over them, and while the wind still whipped snow in eddies around them, the sun had moved from behind the grey clouds and imparted some small amount of warmth on them as it pulled up and away from the distant horizon.

This place was an ocean of snow and ice, as far as the eye could see it was white save for the shadows of snow dunes. It was easy to see why no Thedosians had ever returned once venturing into this place.

His stomach rumbled, shaking him all the way to his feet and he groaned. His knees felt so weak he could have fallen over right there.

Fenris halted ahead of him, peering into the distance."Did you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

"I felt it too." Anders reached for his staff "The earth moved..."

Hawke realised with a shot of dread through his chest that the quiverring had been external, and reached for his weapon as well, weak fingers gripping the braided handles of his dual knives. The waste had gone deadly quiet, he could hear nothing save for the snow sliding across the icy ground and his own breathing.

Another rumble sounded louder than before and something flashed black under a bare patch of ice a few meters ahead of them.

"We should move."

They crept slowly, silently across the ice, Hawke listened intently to the silence that now envelopped them, the sun glinting off the ice like a mirror hiding the waters below from view.

The rumbling began again, passing under their feet and causing a few chunks of loose ice to skitter and jump, and Hawke found himself moving a little faster, eyes intent on the ground nearby as he begun to move sideways, as a hazy black stain began to form just beneath the surface.

"run... RUN!"

Whoever had said it did so just in time for the three of them to start bolting accross the slippery surface as it began to crack beneath them.

The sound was a cacaphony, a wave of water spraying out from the crack and chunks of ice flying everywhere as a great, black, scaly head emerged from the frozen sea with a roar like nothing he had ever heard before. Low and loud, vibrating out from the gaping maw of the leviathan as it slithered out of the crack in the ice after them.

It was fast, impossibly so for a creature with no limbs. Anders was shooting a torrent of half-formed spells at it as he ran, Fenris was shouting over the din to keep moving, and Hawke was trying to not look back as the beast gained on them. He narrowly avoided a strike of its teeth as it reared up and struck at him with it's mighty head, lips drawn back in a growl as it shook the snow from its eyes and spat a dark oil onto the ice, catching Hawke's hand in the substance.

It burned, and it stunk. Smelled worse than the rancor of dead darkspawn and he plunged his hand into the snow to clear it away, seeing his skin mottled pink from the corrosive slick.

Fenris was stalking nearby, letting Hawke draw the creature's attention as he tried to find an opening. Anders was trying to charge up enough energy to cast a bolt of lightening.

Hawke dodged a swipe of its tail, slashing at the apendage as it passed then was tripped up when it passed him again, landing him on the flat of his back. It's head reared up, about to make the killing blow then began shaking as if stung.

Blood coated him, sprayed across the snow and staining it a sickly blackish red, and he saw the harpoon jutting out of the creature's snout before he heard the deep, screaming warcry from behind.

Six feet of black steel leapt from nowhere, grappling onto the polearm and swinging a metal-cased foot into its eye, pulling another shriek from it.

"SOREN!"

Another warrior in black, this one at least a foot taller than the other rode past on the back of an enormous white bear-like creature, an identical weapon poised in front of him as he slashed the tip of the creatures tail in twain. Howling like a wolf as the creature hissed and thrashed, trying to shake the dragoon on it's snout free as the halbard stabbed deep into its head.

Hawke crawled back against the snow, narrowly dodging the beast's tail and barking in surprise as he was hauled aside by a third warrior, smaller than the two with a plume of red and white hair flowing from the helmet. Hefting another deadly spear with a dragon carved up the length of the handle and shifting weight on to one leg, the warrior barely had to advance, throwing it's fearsome weapon between the eyes of the leviathan with deadly accuracy.

The first warrior leapt from its snout in time to avoid being thrown by the force of the impact its head had on the ground as it shuddered and twitched violently in its dying throes, hissing and vomitting the last of its acrid oil into the bloody snow.

It fell still, blood mixing with the acid pouring from its mouth as the warriors took stock of their surroundings.

Hawke found his leg would not cooperate as he made an attempt to slide back, and take a defensive stance. It collapsed painfully beneath him and he hissed.

Anders and Fenris both moved close, managing looking menacing for all their weakened scragglyness. It was nearly a year since Kirkwall, and the time spent running had not treated their bodies kindly.

"Vel, vel, hva har vi her?" It was the second warrior, a deep voice booming from under his helmet as he approached Hawke with a swagger.

"bror, jeg tror de kan være av varm verden." The warrior beside him spoke, a woman's voice that made her deadly accurate strike no less impressive.

The third warrior approached silent, passed his companion her weapon and moved to stand with the other man.

The woman pulled her helmet off, the ornate black steel moving away to reveal milk white skin and a face that was all elegant angles. Small pointed ears that were somewhere between an elf and a human and pierced from lobe to tip. The plume of hair that had flowed from the helmet fell against her shoulders softly and he jumped to see the red there echoed in her irises.

Her mouth was curved into a stern frown. And she moved the offered weapon to point at Hawkes chest.

"Who are you and what buisness have you in my realm, Human?" Her accent was thick, but not impossibly so.

His fingers itched for his blades, they had gone flying somewhere into the snow and he knew that the only weapons he had now were a pair of small daggers that hardly counted against the heavily armed foreigners. "We were travelling through the waste searching for shelter and food. We didn't mean to tresspass."

She looked across to his companions then at her own. Looking thoughtful.

"That does not answer my question."

Hawke raised his hands in the air as her blade tipped closer. He would need to be crafty if he was to avoid being stuck like the beast that now lay rotting on the ice behind the three warriors.

"We are refugees from the war to the North."

She cocked an eyebrow at that, bit her lip briefly and lowered her polearm.

"Very Well." She eyed his broken leg and sighed "The next town is fifty miles south of here. I doubt you will be making that journey on foot. My brothers and I will take you."


	2. Crown a Fox

Fenris walked next to the lumbering beast Hawke had been bodily hefted onto, the woman tugging at it's reins working her jaw as they trudged through the snow, tapping her armored fingers against the metal of her helmet and muttering something to herself in her mothertongue.

She was a head shorter than him, but that made her no less fierce in his eyes and he kept his grip on his greatsword firm.

He had never seen anyone quite as wild looking as this woman. Her hair was a messy white and red mane that fell around her face and shoulders, and down her back, falling as low as her hips over her onyx black armor, glinting fearsomely in the half-light.

The largest brother trotted up beside him, his visor now open to show the shock of silver hair and auburn eyes. A grin on his face as he scratched the head of his mount lightly and regarded the distant mountains. "Freya, what do you expect father will say of our hunting tales this time?"

That earned a snort from the woman, who looked over her shoulder at the behemoth of a man "He has his mind on other things. I doubt he will say much about the slaying of another waste leviathan." Her voice had a low, shadowy quality to it and an accent that he had heard in the large man.

"So serious, my sister. You should show our honoured guests your smile." He chuckled and rode ahead, after the smaller brother.

She hissed, completing the illusion of her ferocity. She reminded him of an angry fox, and he felt his skin prickle when he looked up again and those crimson irises were directed at him for just a moment before they snapped back to the empty space between her brothers ahead of her.

"It has been generations since our people have seen your kind, elf." She didn't look at him then, her single, perfunctory glance having apparently been sufficient for her to work out what he was. "Rarer still to see one who travels freely with Humans."

"Hawke does not suffer slaves to be kept." Fenris spat. If this woman thought him to be a servant to the other two she wouldn't survive the night.

She chuckled at his outburst, tossing her hair to the side "I meant only that in my lands an elf and a human were once rare to be seen together in anything approaching civility. All our texts insist that you should be attempting to scalp those two men and burn their corpses."

"No, he reserves that kind of treatment for mages." Anders shot from his seat behind Hawke who groaned.

"Please don't start you two-"

"If I wasn't constantly running from demon-posessed mages trying to enslave and kill me maybe I would." Fenris growled, glaring at the blond abomination with his narrowed green eyes.

"You seem to find enough time to plunge your fists into our chests and rip our hearts out when the mood suits you." The mage barked back.

"This is more of what I expected." She mumbled none-too-quietly to the animal beside her.

They fell into a tense silence. Boots and paws crunching through the snow, heavy breathing and wind echoing off the approaching cliffs.

Hawke cleared his throat painfully, it was deafening after nearly an hour of nothing.

"What are you? We have never seen your kind in Thedas."

She looked back at him, an eyebrow raised "'Nor would we expect you to. We are Drakhena. We rarely travel outside of Drakinder. You were quite lucky that my brother spotted the Leviathan when he did, we had thought our hunting trip to be finished this day."

"Thank you." Hawke stammered.

She gave a short, saturnine laugh. "I am hardly in the habit of letting men die in the wastes, foreign or no."

"I've never even heard of Drakinder." The mage sounded disbelieving. Fenris had no idea how a man this offensive was still alive.

She glanced ahead to her brothers seemingly thinking the same thing "Again, I would not expect any Thedosian to retain any memory of my people. The last records we have of you are near to eight thousand years ago when the elves founded their cities, any mention of you dissapears with the founding of your second empire."

"Tevinter." Fenris said tersely, he had once heard an old legend about the dragon-men of the South. But these days it was passed off as a fairy tale. Something elven mothers in Tevinter told their children to scare them.

"Precicely." She dipped her chin to him. A nodd of respect that loosened his grip on his greatsword. "To say we were surprised to find you would be a vast understatement."

The foot of the mountains met them as the sun began to dip into the West. A trail leading upwards through a forest of pine the only indication of any foot traffic. It was less trecherous than the ice and snow of the waste, but the steep incline as they began upwards made up for it. The bears, Ursids, the woman had called them, grumbled as they wrestled their heavy load up the incline.

The trail gradually evened out, became almost flat once the silvery moon peaked over the trees. The silence of the day fading into the sounds of owls hooting around them and wolves howling eerily in the distance, the vibrations bouncing off the rock walls of the mountains.

Ahead of them rose an enormous stone wall with an iron gate, red banners edged with a coiling black braid of winding embroidery and emblazonned with a similarly fashioned snakelike dragon, draped from the parapets on either side, shifting in the wind.

Fanaladi, as the little town was called, was about as big as Lothering back in Ferelden. The path leading from the gate cut straight through the town and down the mountains. Houses were of stone and logs, snowcaked with smoke rising from chimenys and the sound of men and women closing their shops for the evening, and families sitting down to dinner, the smell of pine and smoke permeating the village as they moved down the road to one of the larger cabins. The tallest brother helped Anders get Hawke down from his sister's Ursid and then moving off to put them into their stables for the evening.

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><p>She grumbled at the fifth papercut she recieved on the blasted parchment of this letter and pressed the hairline cut to her mouth, tasting copper.<p>

By all logic she should have been sleeping at that moment, It was easily past three bells but Freya found herself unable to nod off, bothered by the sounds the wind made against the window of her borrowed room and by the anxiety swimming in her mind.

She could practically smell the change in the air; like the smell of the earth in autumn that tingled in the back of her mind and twisted like a living thing. She would have normally passed such fanciful ideas off as just that, a figment of her imagination. But the note in her hands brought the reality of it careening into her mind like a well-aimed arrow.

She dropped her finger from her mouth, replacing it with the back of her pen. The parchment, with the red leviathan seal mocked her and she wished she could crumple the damnable missive and toss it into the flames burning low in the hearth of the small library. That somehow that action would make it less real.

The floorboards creaked to her right and she looked over. Her eldest sibling leaning heavily on the doorjamb, A bottle of what looked suspiciously like moonshine in one hand. His white silver hair was tied out of his face and nearly pink irises watching her intently. "I had a feeling I knew what was in that envelope before I gave it to you."

"It's so..." She tried to find the word as he moved to sit in the chair on the oppisite side of the desk, crossing his legs and folding his hands together as he set the bottle down.

"Official?" He offered.

She snorted and spread the note out in front of her, flattening it with careful fingers.

_To her highness Freya Tarania Niobel Volken, Drakhera of the kingdom Drakinder,_

_On behalf of his majesty Halford Baron Regnus Volken we hereby notify you of your temporary discharge from active duty until such a time as you have completed your Gaesling trial. _

_Virtus in honore_

And then the long scrawling signature that could only be her father's.

Tiberius nodded slowly, a hand rising to his jaw and his face fixing in a frown that she knew all too well. He was about to say something that she wouldn't react well to.

"Out with it Tie." She sighed.

"You know Soren and I can't come with you but I spoke with that Hawke fellow a-"

"No."

"-nd he agreed to escort you-"

"Absolutely not Tie! I can handle myself just fine." She huffed and then hastily added "And they couldn't even take down a lesser waste leviathan! What in Drakhir's name makes you think they're qualified?"

"If they hadn't been half starved and nearly frozen solid they would have been fine. From what I gleaned of them they travelled on foot across the wilds and waste and that alone is an impressive feat." He stood, making his decision final and making Freya groan. Tiberius was impossible to argue with.


End file.
